Oracle CRM On Demand Release 29

Oracle CRM On Demand Release 29 continues to drive home Oracle's commitment to ongoing excellence and innovation, delivering enhanced features and functionality on an agile and fast-paced release track to help accelerate sales and ensure customer productivity and revenue.

This latest Oracle CRM On Demand release provides new features in Usability, Mobile and Extensibility. Each of these areas follows the Oracle Customer Experience Strategy, providing a leading and compelling solution for customers and partners to access critical CRM information quickly and easily, all while using their preferred devices and applications.

MORE USABILITY TO DRIVE USER ADOPTION

A positive user experience leads to increased user adoption and ultimately, a better customer experience for your customers. With Release 29 there have been several key enhancements to our User Interface designed with common user tasks in mind. New Record Layouts provides administrators the option of presenting a streamlined Create screen when adding new records. Users are more likely to provide more information when offered fewer fields to fill out, and the new layout will encourage that behavior. Improving the search capability, an Enhanced Text Search feature that supports case-insensitive, fuzzy-like searching has been added. Searching will return records with common spelling and roots, special characters, and even matches with words in a different order. To keep users up to date, the ability to present a Blast Message on Login is now available. When users login, they will receive a pop-up that displays the alert. Alerts can be limited to a specific time window, meaning that once they are set up, there is no need to go back and disable them when the message is no longer necessary. Custom Tooltips enables administrators and business managers to provide help, tips and guidance to their users when creating or editing records. Simply hovering over a field will give the user that extra piece of assistance, ensuring that they know what's required to adhere to business processes. With Release 29, the tooltips have been improved to support HTML formatting to provide a more streamlined look for custom help.

The CRM On Demand calendar has been improved by adding drag and drop appointments - should a meeting need to be moved, simply pick it up and move it to the new time. Additionally, the start day of the week is now configurable, allowing users to adjust their calendar to their work week. To provide more information about the appointment without needing to actually open it, all appointments can optionally display the Account, Contact and Phone Number making it quick and easy to remember who is in the meeting. Color coding has also been added, letting users tell at a glance what sort of meetings are up for the week. Color coding is driven by Appointment Type, and fully configurable to match corporate branding.

MORE MOBILE FOR THE MASSES

Oracle continues to enhance and refine our advanced smart phone and tablet applications, easing the process of selling, signature capture, modification tracking, and distribution of product materials and samples. Using CRM On Demand's advanced mobile tools, sales representatives can focus on the customer and streamline the sales experience, while having the assurance that critical data is current and consistently synchronized between application and device. When users access CRM On Demand from a mobile device, the user interface will change automatically for tablets or touch screen devices, accommodating the different user experience versus a laptop.

Oracle CRM On Demand Connected Mobile Sales (CMS), licensed separately, provides access to CRM information using native applications for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. New features include automatic pre-population of key fields when creating follow-up activities, improved user feedback when accessing records with different visibility rules, more enhancements to the new user interface creating improvements in navigation and usability, and new configuration options to provide mobile access to even more of CRM On Demand.

Oracle CRM On Demand Disconnected Mobile Sales (DMS) is a separately licensed native iPad application that complements the existing capabilities that are available in Oracle CRM On Demand's Life Sciences Edition such as signature capture, samples management, allocations and call planning. New features in DMS Release 1.9.1 have added more options for eDetailing including the ability to track and report on what aspects of a presentation have been delivered so that next time a rep visits a physician, they will know precisely what has been presented and what hasn't - down to the individual page level. In addition, to ensure procedural compliance, more options are available to report on how much of a presentation was provided to the physician. For sales representatives that travel across time zones, a unique feature has been added that will allow them to perform a call submission based on the time zone the call was in instead of the time zone the representative is in. This enhancement ensures that call submission processes are followed while allowing representatives to provide an update while the information is still fresh in their mind.

INCREASE ACCESSIBILITY

Users have many different tools they work with, and many different systems. Providing access to key CRM On Demand data in the variety of tools available is a key strategy for Oracle. CRM On Demand Desktop permits access to all CRM information online or offline. Users can manage CRM On Demand appointments, activities, opportunities, and more directly within Outlook using CRM On Demand Desktop, increasing user adoption and decreasing training costs.

CRM On Demand provides the option to synchronize contacts to the

native iOS device calendar or contact app by supporting the CalDAV and CardDAV standards. Appointments and contacts can be viewed, created, updated and deleted right from your native iOS Calendar and Contact Apps and visible in CRM On Demand automatically; and visa versa.

Generating access for other clients, the iCalendar (.ICF) and vCard (.VCF) standard is also available for CRM On Demand. Users will be able to import appointments and contacts - including photos - from CRM On Demand into other applications, saving them from having to enter data manually when sharing it with their colleagues. The vCard can be imported into CRM On Demand as well, automatically creating a new contact from a shared business card; much faster than typing it in.

BROWSER AND CLOUD SUPPORT

Oracle CRM On Demand Release 29 continues support for popular browsers such as the latest versions of Google Chrome, Firefox and Android. Mobile browser support allows continuous access to critical CRM data and helps executives and sales representatives alike manage business imperatives while on the go. Extensibility in the cloud underscores the importance of hosted CRM server code with client-side extensions; this provides a platform for customers to create rich and powerful customizations. Better yet, customers can leverage Oracle infrastructure for inherent security and better performance.

SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Interacting with customers via social channels is rapidly becoming a key strategy to drive customer satisfaction. Oracle CRM On Demand Release 29 offers tightly coupled integration to the full set of Oracle's Social Relationship Management Suite including Oracle Social Network, which provides internal conversation and document collaboration; Social Marketing which allows the creation of a lead from a Social Campaign directly in CRM On Demand; and Social Engagement and Monitoring that enables users to create a Service Request from a social post and respond to your customers in the channel they have decided to engage with you.

DOING BUSINESS YOUR WAY

CRM On Demand continues to expand its functionality release after release to adapt to your changing business needs. In CRM On Demand Release 29, workflow has been improved by adding coverage to the User Object, granting the ability to trigger events when a user record is changed, such as a new role. To maintain visibility when using Books of Business, the record merge functionality has been enhanced to optionally add the newly merged record to the Books of Business that were available on the original records. Doing so will ensure that all users that require access to the record keep that access, without any extra administrative effort. Similarly, when changing record ownership, a new option is available to add the previous owner to the team - allowing for knowledge transfer, training and archiving.

As with each release, enhancements have been made to improve Web services. Release 29 sees the addition of a Report List Service for Analytics, making it possible to retrieve a list of all the reports in CRM On Demand in preparation for migrating them from pod to pod. Administrative Web Services can now extract the data for Dynamic Page Layouts, providing administrators the ability to migrate page layouts from Stage to Production, making it even easier to roll out enhancements to the users without manual recreation. Additionally, the Java Script API has been enhanced with Language Specific Coding, allowing integrations to retrieve field information in the language that the user sees rather than a default language ensuring that any integrations built can contain logic that may be unique to different regions or languages and improve overall usability.

For Analytics reporting, continuous performance improvements and increased object coverage underscore Oracle's commitment to provide the tools to generate critical business intelligence that help map the path to future initiatives. In Release 29 coverage was added for optimized custom fields across multiple objects, including Activity, Contact, Opportunity and Service Request.